It was not the loss of
nearly a billion dollars of investment that elicited the morosity, nor the fates
of the 1,300 brave early adopters left with limited cars that drew forth tears.
The closure of Better Place was the death of a dream, a broken promise, a body
blow to inspired vision and a reminder of the start-up nation’s
limits.

While there are those who will argue that replacing the gasoline
infrastructure that keeps the world addicted to oil with an electric one was a
pipe dream to begin with, many see in Better Place a story of poor execution,
what one employee called a problem of moving from visionary to operative
mode.

Unquestionably, the company innovated novel solutions to
long-standing problems in the way of making electric cars viable in the
marketplace.

To cover the costs of expensive batteries, it figured that
it could merely lease them to the car owners, charging them by the mile. To
counter problems with driving long distances without a lengthy recharge, it
decided to swap those batteries for fresh ones at specially built
stations.

But the devil is, as always, in the details.

For one,
the company bit off more than it could chew. Instead of focusing on one small
market such as Israel, so that it could fine-tune all the details and iron out
mistakes, it poured investments into Denmark, Australia and the United States,
burning through cash on the assumption that it would not face any problems
entering the market.

Far too late in the game, it shut down operations
outside Israel and Denmark, where the infrastructure was already complete, to
focus its efforts.

“We were expending a lot of energy on getting the idea
out to other markets. It’s a very sexy idea and we got carried away,” one
executive said.

A second failure was the company’s inability to get more
than one car manufacturer – Renault – to produce its rather uniform
fleet.

Bearing only a small portion of the financial risks and having no
competition in the switchable battery market, Renault had few incentives to make
the cars cheaper. Instead of passing generous tax breaks on to consumers, the
company was able to push up the prices and gobble up the difference.

The
company’s final failure, however, an offshoot of the first two, came from its
inability to inspire confidence, or as a spokesman termed it, build “social
proof.”

Without an aggressive enough push to get cars on the market, the
general public kept its distance from the company, fearing it as an unknown. The
fact that the dramatic company shake-up that ousted Agassi happened only months
after its initial foray into the market didn’t help matters. In fact, the only
way the company managed to produce a spike in sales was when it offered new
leasing options, which allowed unsure customers an exit path after a year. When
Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn glibly said earlier in May that he did not see battery-
swapping cars as the future, he hammered the final nail into the Better Place
coffin.

The fuel-hungry transportation market – which exacerbates
environmental damage and funds petro-dictatorships – is expected only to grow as
giants like China and India continue to develop. The worst repercussion of
Better Place’s fall from grace, then, is the false impression it will leave on
the next generation of entrepreneurs, thinkers and investors: that tough
problems cannot be solved, and that innovative thinking is merely wishful
dreaming.